04:07 pm - TIA - 11 August 2004Not as ambitious this week. Work, women, all kinds of distractions this week.

InterviewsWe have an interview scheduled with Clay Shirky, an interesting voice in the publishing discussion. After reading his infoporn essay in the latest Wired, I decided he might be fun to talk to. That article ("WhyOprah Will Never Talk to You. Ever.") doesn't appear to be online, but this article by him on Many-to-Many feels like a precursor. He also has some interesting and outspoken opinions on topics like micropayments.

Maybe pietro will call and give a live remote from SIGGRAPH. Probably not, but it could happen. Lessig will probably be broadcast next week.

News/Editorials

The new space race suffered a couple of setbacks this week. These mistakes, while clearly more complicated than made out to be, still remind us that this is amateur rocket science, and that not all of the corners -- like "sense or inspect everything, everytime" -- may be cut without consequence. At the next level up, we are finally seeing solar sail experiments in space. Strange that it has taken so long, the simulators worked so well in 1982.

Do we have a legitimate demonstration of P2P power and usefulness? The mythical XP SP2 has been released, but because of bandwidth limitations (they say), Microsoft will be trickling it out to end users (100m+) over the next two months. And that seems reasonable, considering how many users there are and how big the download is. But a group put it up on BitTorrent, which should handle the 266mb download just fine.